My impressions on this mod

This mod adds so many Quality of Life modifications, it's really refreshing. Love the fort condor teleport, the early game Enemy Away and the ability to Skip huge portions of dialogue!

It overall edits a lot of things, adds quite a few unexpected bosses, changes items, materias, and equipment fairly drastically, and even grants you a way to easily grind materia levels late game!

But then there are the bosses... they take a long time to kill for virtually no reason in my opinion; an opinion that doesn't seem to be shared by many, yet no one can deny that the outcome of storyline bosses' battles is already determined 1/4th of the way into the battle. It just becomes a process of "Rinse and Repeat until the boss is dead". Of course, there is the possibility that the fight will drag on long enough for you to run out of items, but you get easily used to the bosses' huge HP that you just instinctively gather quite a few items before each boss fight.

Then there are the optional bosses. 100x harder than the storyline bosses. I don't enjoy difficulty and I thought the storyline bosses were well balanced and never really had anything close to a problem with any of them, but the optional bosses in this mod just reminds me so much of 1.3 where you just end up needing a way too specific setup to be able to win the fight. It just destroys any kind of build creativity since you have to abuse absolutely everything you can to beat those bosses.

I really loved the game otherwise, but I am unable to finish it at this point because I don't find Disc 3 fun at all. As I said, I don't like difficulty; especially extreme level of difficulty, so this wasn't for me. Even saying that, Disc 1-2 were really awesome.

As a side note: Death will bring happiness to everyone in the slums. --My wife playing FF7 and renaming Aeris to "Death".

33 minutes ago, Xifanie said:

hen there are the optional bosses. 100x harder than the storyline bosses. I don't enjoy difficulty and I thought the storyline bosses were well balanced and never really had anything close to a problem with any of them, but the optional bosses in this mod just reminds me so much of 1.3 where you just end up needing a way too specific setup to be able to win the fight. It just destroys any kind of build creativity since you have to abuse absolutely everything you can to beat those bosses

While I disagree with most of this, and wish that the story bosses were harder, I do think the jump between the story bosses and the optional bosses is a little extreme. 

1 hour ago, Xifanie said:

This mod adds so many Quality of Life modifications, it's really refreshing. Love the fort condor teleport, the early game Enemy Away and the ability to Skip huge portions of dialogue!

It overall edits a lot of things, adds quite a few unexpected bosses, changes items, materias, and equipment fairly drastically, and even grants you a way to easily grind materia levels late game!

But then there are the bosses... they take a long time to kill for virtually no reason in my opinion; an opinion that doesn't seem to be shared by many, yet no one can deny that the outcome of storyline bosses' battles is already determined 1/4th of the way into the battle. It just becomes a process of "Rinse and Repeat until the boss is dead". Of course, there is the possibility that the fight will drag on long enough for you to run out of items, but you get easily used to the bosses' huge HP that you just instinctively gather quite a few items before each boss fight.

I really loved the game otherwise, but I am unable to finish it at this point because I don't find Disc 3 fun at all. As I said, I don't like difficulty; especially extreme level of difficulty, so this wasn't for me. Even saying that, Disc 1-2 were really awesome.

I agree with everything here except that the bosses take too long to kill.  If you mean going in blind then I definitely agree.  Sometimes it took quite a few battles before I'd figure out what to do.  It reminded me of the feeling of frustration and then accomplishment that I had playing this game as a 7 year old.  That's just me though.

Once I got sense materia I never took it off lolz.

1 hour ago, Xifanie said:

As a side note: Death will bring happiness to everyone in the slums. --My wife playing FF7 and renaming Aeris to "Death".

When I confronted the mod creator about it, he linked me a video of a sped-up boss battle, which personally took me just as long... his solution? Speedhacking.

I stand by my point I stated earlier:

2 hours ago, Xifanie said:

"Rinse and Repeat until the boss is dead"

The outcome has always been extremely clear every storyline boss fight after I figured out the boss' attack pattern. There is only one boss I lost against through the game.

Maybe 10-13 min per boss (at normal speed) isn't too slow for you, but I just don't see the point. I don't see how it adds to the experience. It doesn't make bosses harder. It doesn't even make them more tedious.

10 minutes ago, Xifanie said:

When I confronted the mod creator about it, he linked me a video of a sped-up boss battle, which personally took me just as long... his solution? Speedhacking.

I stand by my point I stated earlier:

The outcome has always been extremely clear every storyline boss fight after I figured out the boss' attack pattern. There is only one boss I lost against through the game.

Maybe 10-13 min per boss (at normal speed) isn't too slow for you, but I just don't see the point. I don't see how it adds to the experience. It doesn't make bosses harder. It doesn't even make them more tedious.

It makes it so "jam summons down the enemies throat" isn't a viable strategy for every single boss. The HP pool makes it so you have to actually figure out the attack pattern, rather than just do huge bursts of damage and kill the boss in a couple turns.

I thought that was the point of making summons only useable once per battle? Also summon animations are lengthy; that's why I never used them in FFVIII, and that's why speedrunners don't use them. Crappy DPS.

1 minute ago, Kjata said:

The HP pool makes it so you have to actually figure out the attack pattern

...But I figured out the attack pattern 2 minutes in, 12 minutes before the end of the battle.

Crappy DPS, but pretty high damage per action. Between Kjata hitting half of the bosses for 9999 and Bahamut doing like 4k, as well as other summons, doing 30k damage in handful of turns isnt unreasonable.

2 hours ago, Xifanie said:

Then there are the optional bosses. 100x harder than the storyline bosses. I don't enjoy difficulty and I thought the storyline bosses were well balanced and never really had anything close to a problem with any of them, but the optional bosses in this mod just reminds me so much of 1.3 where you just end up needing a way too specific setup to be able to win the fight. It just destroys any kind of build creativity since you have to abuse absolutely everything you can to beat those bosses.

I really loved the game otherwise, but I am unable to finish it at this point because I don't find Disc 3 fun at all. As I said, I don't like difficulty; especially extreme level of difficulty, so this wasn't for me. Even saying that, Disc 1-2 were really awesome.

The balancing for a lot of the later game is off; most of that comes from gradual changes made over time to the underlying systems like character stats, the change to how sources are dished out, equipment changes, that sort of thing. The overhaul I'm doing should correct it. As for boss HP and the duration of battles, that's up in the air; it's difficult to gauge duration.

The vids I had were run at 20fps instead of the native 15fps but the 1.5 balancing run I've done was played at normal speed so I could try and get more into the player's head. I was juggling the idea of having a 'Fast mode' where enemy HP will be decremented by a certain amount so people can opt for faster battles, but instead I tried to spec fights to be around 6-8mins. It's just tricky to gauge it for blind attempts; I try to have elemental weaknesses be consistent with the physical characteristics of a boss like Earth for large enemies (most bosses are quite big) but I messed that up for human enemies (too many hard Poison counters) and it doesn't help for surprise encounters.

As far as Disc 3 goes, I've been fine-tuning the bosses there and overhauling them. Some were very overbearing, others didn't really have much in the way of interesting mechanics due to quickfixes to get rid of bugs, etc. Lv.4 Limit bosses should have been specced as 'stepping stones' rather than full out superbosses so I've taken that into account with them. I've reinstated Emerald and Ruby as the game's superbosses instead, and made the rest more manageable for different parties. Defence and front row physical damage is proving problematic but I'll get there.

11 minutes ago, Sega Chief said:

The balancing for a lot of the later game is off; most of that comes from gradual changes made over time to the underlying systems like character stats, the change to how sources are dished out, equipment changes, that sort of thing. The overhaul I'm doing should correct it. As for boss HP and the duration of battles, that's up in the air; it's difficult to gauge duration.

The vids I had were run at 20fps instead of the native 15fps but the 1.5 balancing run I've done was played at normal speed so I could try and get more into the player's head. I was juggling the idea of having a 'Fast mode' where enemy HP will be decremented by a certain amount so people can opt for faster battles, but instead I tried to spec fights to be around 6-8mins. It's just tricky to gauge it for blind attempts; I try to have elemental weaknesses be consistent with the physical characteristics of a boss like Earth for large enemies (most bosses are quite big) but I messed that up for human enemies (too many hard Poison counters) and it doesn't help for surprise encounters.

As far as Disc 3 goes, I've been fine-tuning the bosses there and overhauling them. Some were very overbearing, others didn't really have much in the way of interesting mechanics due to quickfixes to get rid of bugs, etc. Lv.4 Limit bosses should have been specced as 'stepping stones' rather than full out superbosses so I've taken that into account with them. I've reinstated Emerald and Ruby as the game's superbosses instead, and made the rest more manageable for different parties. Defence and front row physical damage is proving problematic but I'll get there.

Well, there are some major problems with balancing, I admit. Early game, all the bosses that are vulnerable to poison will have 75%+ of the total damage that you deal dealt in poison damage from Dirty Bombs. If you don't have one (and they're cheap as hell), you're in for a VERY long fight. I'm all for status/elemental weaknesses, but this makes poison infliction practically essential for these bosses. Just about every storyline boss also lacks immunity to slow; I'm not complaining, but slow just helps so much with boss fights that it brings me to my next point:

The boss fights drag on for long enough that I have restarted most battles after analyzing the bosses because it was faster to let the boss kill me/kill myself, reload the save, adjust my materia/equipment, and beat the boss way faster than if I had stuck with my original setup. Of course, in the original version, bosses are so squishy that it's practically never beneficial to do this unless it's Emerald, Ruby or one of the final bosses. I'm definitely not asking to be able to finish off bosses in a single limit, because, let's admit, it is a bit ridiculous.

I think 6-8 minutes per boss fight is very reasonable. To me that's just about an ideal, in fact. I am, however, worried about all the people who disagreed with me and thought lengthier fights were ideal. I'm not saying their opinion don't count, but as hard as I try to understand, I haven't heard any compelling reason for me to believe that longer boss fights made anything better. I don't think I'm that much smarter than the average player and figure out enemy patterns way faster than others. I really appreciate the initiative you've been putting into this though.

Yeah, the lvl4 limit bosses were far too strong for me to bother with them. I wanted to keep playing in Disc 3, but every optional boss was too hard except for the Kitty Tank at the Battle Square and all the Junior Leagues (Laser abuse and stuff).

I don't think overly long fights are good, but there wasnt a time when I ever thought that bosses took to long. I think the battle length is very well done in NT, if a fight only takes 5 minutes I'll just shrug and think "that's it?"

17 hours ago, Kjata said:

I don't think overly long fights are good, but there wasnt a time when I ever thought that bosses took to long. I think the battle length is very well done in NT, if a fight only takes 5 minutes I'll just shrug and think "that's it?"

I think the problem here is that it's not about the actual time it takes but the perception of the time and your experiences in that time. Doesn't matter if the guy takes 15mins if you're just autofiring the same combo over and over.. strategy or not it's a slog once you figure out the pattern. A 5min fight that takes change ups of strategy feels like a longer and more involved fight than 5mins of the same crap.

Most of the bosses in NT do change their AI/attacks mid-fight.

I can't say I've noticed that in most boss fights, but tbh I always thought FF7 didn't have AI and instead just had random skill selection until I found out about it a few years ago on qhimm. It's definitely not been enough for me to have to change my strategy mid-fight except for one boss or two. One really awesome boss fight was the Red Dragon in the Temple of the Ancients, but it looks like you more or less doubled the length of that fight because of that major change mid-fight, so I still express the same battle length concern as with the other bosses.

IIRC There was a stilva-like boss that went berserk mid-fight, and was insanely hard... I found it very interesting for it to behave that way; the AI change was very obvious in that case, and I barely managed to beat the goddamn thing.

I also remember the Turks not liking to be poisoned, and I never figured out what prevented them from using Turks Heal anymore... running out of MP? So that was interesting, and annoying (more like of a "You bitch" rather than "AUUUUUUGGHHH!! ").

5 hours ago, Sega Chief said:

Most of the bosses in NT do change their AI/attacks mid-fight.

Oh I wasn't claiming they didn't...just saying that the time it takes isn't as important as the experience had during that time. In reference to their differing opinions on battle time.

I do agree with the slog argument - there are a lot of bosses that require you to figure out the pattern and then repeat it a bunch in order to win. You do generally want to require a little repetition in case the first time was a fluke, but in bosses that don't have obvious phase changes like the Powersoul Keeper or Dyne, it can get to be annoying. If you can figure out what the accelerated summon animation mod does, maybe incorporating that in a way that's compatible with the Ruby Weapon fight would help? Once you've got that QoL change, it's easier to justify toning down the HP damage that summons do.

That summon speed-up thing is still in beta and buggy as hell; there are other attacks that also use the same kind of flags that Ruby's tentacles do so I'd worry about including it with NT at this late stage. It's a separate mod as well so I'd probably leave that to the user's discretion to apply it to their game or not.

I've been thinking about the issue with fight length. What I'll do is run some tests on a sample of bosses against a 'blind' team and then an optimal team. There's a lot of stuff I can't account for on the player's end but it should help things if I make adjustments to find a middle-ground.

On 5/8/2017 at 8:21 PM, Kjata said:

While I disagree with most of this, and wish that the story bosses were harder, I do think the jump between the story bosses and the optional bosses is a little extreme. 

The only issue in this situation is if you have to end up grinding in order to beat those bosses which in turn would make the story encounters even easier.  All in all I feel like if you are going to add difficulty spikes optional content is the best way to do it because it is something the player doesn't have to do.

I haven't played NT so it's difficult to comment on the actual encounters but I like the design choice overall. Ideally you would want to make it so that these were encounters that would be hard your first play-through but as you learned more about things and played through on your second try you could tweak some interesting strategy that doesn't force you to grind.

7 hours ago, Xontract said:

The only issue in this situation is if you have to end up grinding in order to beat those bosses which in turn would make the story encounters even easier.  All in all I feel like if you are going to add difficulty spikes optional content is the best way to do it because it is something the player doesn't have to do.

There isn't any story encounters left, you have to get to the end of the crater and be like 5 steps away from the end sequence to unlock them. I don't think the difficulty spike is a huge issue, when you get to the end of the game you have been beating bosses on your first try, maybe your second. Now you unlock bosses that are going to take up to a dozen tries. I died more times to one of the optional end game bosses than I did to the entire rest of the game combined.

Now don't get me wrong, I've said several times that I wish the main game was harder. But it's a pretty damn jarring shift, especially when all that's left is these bosses and Sephiroth, who is to my knowledge at least as strong. So you get a huge spike in difficulty with nothing else to do, at the end of a game that's pretty easy up to that point.

One of the main goals of the 1.5 build is dealing with this specific problem. The build was planned to be done with by February/March but the balancing was so off that I had to start from scratch with a lot of the Disc 3 enemies; I've been rebuilding their AI, attacks, and stats then testing them against different parties.

Re: Sephiroth

Bizarro took some effort because I didn't walk in there prepared for 3 parties, because I'm an idiot. Safer got roflstomped by Tifa, who, as I recall, got two rounds of quad-quad-9s in before he started flying high and got pasted by quad-Bahamut ZEROs. Didn't even have time to become a Starfucker (incidentally, I'd like to petition you to rename Supernova to "Starfucker Supreme"). The Hero Medal challenge afterward was also fairly easy once I accounted for the negative status spam, though I did lose the first time as Cloud was not wearing adequate protective gear going in. Those bosses are pretty much trivial for a party that can handle the superbosses, but that's probably just part of the genre. I never faced them with an ordinary party, so I can't speak to the challenge level along that line.

Hello I am new to NG plus and was not sure where to post this, i originally acquired NT from Insane Difficulty and discovered NG and HAD to join this seemingly awesome community. So ill get straight to my questin if ok, I have been loving this mod one of the absolute best out there for ANY game I am through Nibel on disk 1 and come to realize that a new version seems to be coming out soon?? Will my save transfer? will the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 and up confilict with my current game? i tried to browse the forums on where to find some better info for my concern and turned up nothing. perhaps i am not looking hard enough? Some info about this would be great or at least on where to look. Thank you so much for this and just wanted to remind you that you guys do amazing work for true fans out there.

The save file should work, but you might see some oddities.

awesome thank you so much ive been devoting alot of time to this id hate for a new version make all my efforts go to waist. i dont have the time to start all over again. Thank you for the reply, and again the work on this is A W E S O M E. and if possible work on the oddities? if not thats cool

i notice the mod page still says 1.5 is about to release? is it still on its way???

Hey Sega Chief. Very nice job with the mod. I've been having a lot of fun with it. I'm contacting you because I'm having trouble on disc 3. The difficulty spike is crazy and I want to finish the game but I'm stuck. I noticed in this thread you said you were going to fine-tune the bosses and overhaul them. However that was earlier in the year. Can you continue to work on this or help me with strategies or something? I can't beat any boss in the crater or any lv 4 limit bosses either. I've been making use of the source system and I'm lvl 81 with Cloud and everyone else being 70ish so I don't think I'm under-leveled. Any help would be appreciated. No other complaints really and again great job.

Btw, does anyone know where the Mirage enemy is in the Dark Cave? According to the document titled "where is the thing," Mirage drops the Mystile and is located in the Dark Cave. I just finished it and never saw this enemy. Did I miss my chance for this item permanently? Also does anyone have a good place to grind levels?